• In sharp contrast with Westerners, the Japanese still vividly remember nineteenth century colonialism � a time when East Asian nations were repeatedly humiliated at the hands of Britain, the United States, and other leading Western nations.

• The Japanese economic and political system is a conscious construct, and owes its origins to a highly organized effort by Japan to catch up with the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• The system diverges sharply, and in many cases disturbingly, from our Western system of free markets and democratic rule.

• Many of these divergences make the Japanese system fundamentally incompatible with Western economics. Only the most obvious of the problems is Japan's traditionally mercantilist approach to foreign trade.

• Precisely because the system diverges from the Western model, it has outperformed Western economies in many important respects, most notably in its ability to conquer foreign markets.

To understand the scale of Fallows�s achievement, it is important to realize that the field of Japan studies poses unique problems for Western observers. The language barrier is the obvious problem but an even bigger issue is the Tokyo authorities� propaganda activities. Concerned to avoid alarming Westerners about the degree to which Japanese economics diverges from Western norms, Japanese leaders have long sought to disguise their system�s more controversial features. One of their most important propaganda tools has been to create confusion by, for instance, inventing multiple, often mutually contradictory versions, of the facts of Japanese life. The propaganda has been so effective that it is now almost impossible for Westerners to agree among themselves about even basic aspects of Japanese reality. Hence the noisy and often bad-tempered Tower of Babel that is the community of American Japanologists today .

A jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces

For anyone trying to make sense of Japanese economics, it is as if one is faced with a bizarre jigsaw puzzle in which only a small proportion of the pieces are authentic. Thus before one can make any progress, one must first eliminate the spurious pieces. Unfortunately the spurious pieces have been well designed to confuse. Viewed narrowly they often seem to fit and it is only when you step back and look at the larger picture that you realize that something is amiss.

Before Fallows, few Westerners had made any systematic attempt to see the larger picture. Western scholars for instance had narrowly focused research agendas that rarely required them to stop and consider how their findings meshed with findings in other disciplines. The confusion was all the greater for the fact that virtually without exception such scholars had little or no exposure to the realities of life in Japan. Their experience of this, one of the world�s most elusive nations, was generally limited to a few short, carefully chaperoned visits in which they typically spent as much time being wined and dined by Japan Inc. propaganda operatives as pursuing their scholarly chores.

Not coincidentally, one result of such �scholarship� was an almost total failure by the West to recognize the true nature Japan's trade policies. Thus America�s chronically stunted exports to Japan were attributed not to any policy agenda on the part of the Tokyo authorities � oh no! � but rather to various perceived American deficiencies, such as poor work methods or short-sighted management thinking.

Rebutting the blame-America story

Among the many key contributions Fallows makes to our understanding is to offer an authoritative rebuttal to all such blame-America explanations of the U.S.-Japan trade imbalances. Alert from the start to the dangers of relying on the Japan Inc. welcome wagon, Fallows strove to develop direct, unfiltered insights into how the Japanese live. A key part of the exercise was not only to live for an extended period in Japan but to live the same sort of life that ordinary Japanese citizens do. Eschewing the comforts of a luxury gaijin apartment in the center of Tokyo, he chose to live instead in a typical suburb about twenty miles out of town. He also traveled extensively in the East Asian region, conducting on-the-spot research on the impact of Japan's economic expansionism everywhere from Malaysia to Korea. Delving deeply not only into Japan's economic arrangements but its history, culture, and politics, Looking at the Sun is the summation of seven years of on-the-spot study in East Asia. It is the definitive solution to the enigma of Japanese trade.


Eamonn Fingleton is the author most recently of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity.